Restaurant owner raided by Sheriff Joe Arpaio gets $5 million settlement
By: Joseph Wilkinson (MSN)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
He won't need to cook his books.
A Phoenix restaurant owner received a $5 million settlement Wednesday because of questionable raids on his business by ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Bret Frimmel sued Maricopa County shortly after his 2014 arrest under one of Arpaio's controversial anti-immigration laws. Frimmel had been charged with hiring workers who applied for jobs using fake IDs.
© Ross D. Franklin In this Aug. 26, 2019, photo, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio poses for a portrait at his private office in Fountain Hills, Arizona.
In this Aug. 26, 2019, photo, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio poses for a portrait at his private office in Fountain Hills, Arizona. (Ross D. Franklin/)
But those charges were quickly tossed when a judge determined Arpaio's deputies had lied to obtain search warrants for Frimmel's restaurant, Uncle Sam's. The judge ruled there was no probable cause to search the business.
Frimmel sued the county for illegal search and seizure and defamation. He also accused Arpaio of malicious arrest and abuse of process, but a judge tossed those parts of the lawsuit in 2019.
Maricopa County taxpayers will cover $3.1 million of the settlement, with insurance providing the other $1.9 million.
Between 2008 and 2014, the Arpaio-led Maricopa County Sheriff's Office raided 80 businesses under the fake ID law. They arrested hundreds of immigrants, including nine at Frimmel's restaurant.
The lawsuit was one of the final civil rights claims against Arpaio, who cost the county more than $150 million during his 24-year tenure as sheriff because of lawsuits like Frimmel's.
Arpaio was voted out of office in 2016 and lost his comeback bid in 2020. He said Wednesday that he wished the county had taken the case to trial and believed he would have won.
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Thanks Sheriff Joe.
I do think it's more egregious that Arpaio cost the county that much money than somebody hiring employees with fake IDs
Don't those settlements ultimately come out of the taxpayers' pockets?
Yes
They certainly do.
That does not even include the costs he incurred at his tent city summer camp Maricopa County Jail. Turns out Sherriff Joe's family owned the contractor business that supplied the baloney sandwich bag lunches supplied to the inmates. Joe Arpaio's family and cronies skimmed million off of that using using expired meat and bread. My late son spent two months as a guest of Sherriff Joe's tent city back in 2008 and he had a lot of interesting stories he garnered from other inmates and the guards themselves.
If you consider taxes going toward the insurance payments, yes indirectly completely. From the article...........
Yep.
Isn't that illegal?
It wasn't if you were Sherriff Joe! At least until he got ratted out on by somebody in the MCSD.
Moral people would at least consider the contract itself a conflict of interest;
using old bread and meat is probably better than throwing it in a dumpster for the crows & ravens of AZ.
Inmates are guaranteed living out their sentence, not 5 star food or Subway sandwiches,
but more than enough bread and water.
Still...the health of the inmates is the responsibility of the sheriff. If he's got dozens of inmates falling ill from food poisoning he may have 'splaining to do
Normally, I would agree with you but according to my son there seemed to be a abnormal number of food poising cases popping up during his 60 day stay. All were attributed to the sack lunches give to the inmates. In addition, Arpaio was jacking up the prices on the books on what he payed the food purveyors for said expired food and skimming the difference into his and family's bank accounts to the tune of millions over the years his family had the contract.
My time in AZ was in Santa Cruz county at least a few years before Arpiao started his reign of terror.
You are much better situated to state the facts than I am.
Also no one ever accused me of being "normal",lol
Especially if your first name is Abbe!
So he cost the county 150 million yet people still cheer for him?
I guess fiscal conservatism is out the window when they can have a bigoted asshole running the county...
just another instance of some POS GOPer writing wedge issue checks the taxpayers have to make good. too bad there isn't a law on the books that would hold them financially accountable.
This Is How Trump Relies on Undocumented Labor for His Resorts
“If you’re a good worker, papers don’t matter,” one former employee said
On Friday, the Washington Post published a report about how President Donald Trump relies on an itinerant construction crew that includes undocumented immigrants to work on many of his resort properties.
The Post spoke with two former employees of the construction crew that operates under Trump’s company, Mobile Payroll Construction LLC, and performs repairs and small construction jobs on Trump properties.
“If you’re a good worker, papers don’t matter,” said Jorge Castro, an Ecuadoran immigrant who works at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., said.
Castro also said that Trump “doesn’t want undocumented people in the country … But at his properties, he still has them.
Edmundo Morocho, another former employee, spoke with the Post as well, saying that he was once told by a supervisor to purchase false papers on the streets of New York City and was instructed to hide in the woods near a Trump golf course to evade being spotted by labor officials visiting the property.
Is that like republicans secretly giving their mistress an abortion...
Mistresses, wives, daughters.
Posing for a portrait.
Really sick that he actually thinks he is all that and some kind of hero.
Delusional.
I wonder why he wasn't wearing his hoodie?
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In my younger days I actually supported Sherriff Joe as somebody I thought was willing to stand up to the status quo in Arizona and Washington, DC. I was only years later that I came to realize that Arpaio was a outdated anachronism of a bygone era and he and his methods became far more part of the problem than the solution. I believe Arpaio once tried to compare himself and his method to "Texas John" Slaughter, a legendary American lawman, cowboy, poker player, rancher, and sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona on the Mexican border in the late 1800's.
This guy wasn’t a public servant. He was a public menace.
He should run for Congress. He's got the graft and other corruption down pat